Wayward #1 – Review

By: Jim Zub (Writer), Steve Cummings (Artist), John Rauch and Jim Zub (Color Artists), Marshall Dillon (Letterer), Zack Davisson (Back Matter)

The Story: Rori Lane gets Spirited Away…

The Review: I wasn’t sure if I was ready to follow a new title, but the cover art was nice and the premise was a familiar but favorite set-up. And I’m really glad I did. This was a great comic, presented with true craft and care.

The story is pretty basic in its broad strokes– a young woman moves to Japan and finds a secret, supernatural reality to its urban mundaneness. So what can the creators do to explore this common trope? Simply by staying so earnestly true to the characters and to the world-building. The main character, Rori, displays appropriate emotions (loss, frustration, confusion, wonder) without resorting to melodrama. She’s coming to Japan for the first time, to help readers who are also new to this world, but she’s not so fish-out-of-water as to be helpless or cliché. This could easily be taken as a slice-of-life or travelogue story, except of course for the strange powers she discovers and the creatures she encounters.

What really shines here is the depiction of Tokyo. Having lived in Tokyo for five years, I have mixed feelings when I see it show up in entertainment. Too often it resorts to grand generalizations if not downright stereotype, and even after living there for five years I find it difficult to understand some otaku’s passion for the romanticized vision they have of it. Instead, the writer and artists here show us a completely realistic depiction, free from cliché and overwrought examples. Rori, for example, alights from the subway in Ikebukuro and is still just as overwhelmed with the experience as she would be if she emerged into Shibuya– the go-to example that *everyone* uses to announce to the reader/viewer “this is Japan.” We see Rori experiencing underground malls, escalator-less stairwells, crowded alleyways, and cramped apartments.

Every panel is lovingly detailed. Corrugated rooftops, set tables in the restaurant, public transport with individuals and background action, even the locks on the doors of the apartment– are all what you will find in Japan. You can even read the vending machines labels and almost every sign in the background.

This simple day-to-day living is presented with great care and highlights the appearance of the supernatural. Its a nice example of “magical realism” with just a suggestion of an unseen reality, whose worlds we want to see explored in coming issues.